Posted some of the current series on my Facebook page. Got a few thumbs up, which always feels good for a few moments. I'm off to buy lumber to make frames for the two submissions I'll be delivering next week, plus a larger painting I've decided to put in my new office.

I have some medium arriving this week and I can get back to work.

I told a friend recently that I'm ready to take my career to the next level, but I don't really know how to do that. It's been a crazy year, and even though there's lots to remain negative and even fatalistic about, I for one just don't have it in me anymore. We may lose a large chunk of our government to right-wing wackos (yeah, I said it) this november, but well, good luck with that people. As the fab four said, "we'd all love to see the plan."

None of that changes going into the studio and laying it down and spending time letting the work speak. In some ways I feel like this current work is very technical, and yet it seems to have an unprecedented mass appeal. It's arguably the most non-objective painting I've ever done, while at the same time existing as almost straight-ahead landscapes. It's also a hell of a lot of fun to paint, so I see a lot of it coming.

For once in my life, I'm trying hard not to stop doing something because people tell me they like it. How's that for career-pathing?

I'm also really sick of hearing myself bitch and moan about being remote. I love being remote 99% of the time. I love NYC, but 48 hours of it and I'm ready to be in a big, open field by myself, or out on the beach. I don't think the vistas I'm creating could come from my previous life as an urban-dweller. The lack of density I have lived in this past decade has gotten me in touch with my childhood sense of space from the Southwest. The new work is small (by my standards) and ready to hang, so I've eliminated one of the many, and very real obstacles to exhibiting elsewhere.

For those handful of people that I know have followed me from the MDM blog and have a sense of the arc of my work in the past 3 or 4 years, I think there is a new maturity in this recent stuff. I'd like to hear from you. Not flattery either, just observations. Part of this blog, as well as MDM was about transparent process. Part of that process is a fair amount of self doubt and inhibition and even hesitation. Until recently, I held back on some approaches I wanted to embrace. Now I feel a new confidence and focus. I just need to figure out how to translate that into getting me and my work to a broader audience, preferably in person.